File - Extended Version
by DeansBabyBird
Summary: I write each week in the E/O drabble challenge and this weeks word was File. A couple of fellow players suggested they would like to read a bit more of the back-story so here is a slightly longer look. Hope you like it Dizzo and Emebalia.


**File - Extended Version.**

We walk in single file. Dean leads, then me and Sam brings up the rear.

It makes us a smaller target they tell me and I try and hang onto that but most of the time I'm still so goddamn frightened that I can barely breath.

We match our pace to Dean's injured leg, so it's slow, but he's hurt 'cause of me so I don't say a word about it and when we stop to eat, or attempt to sleep, I make sure he's as comfortable as he can be.

It's too little, but it's all I can do.

wWw

We'd been hiking in the forest when they took us down. They came out of nowhere and it was so fast that we hardly had time to scream, let alone defend ourselves. Not that we would have known how to anyway.

Not against them.

Even now, when I've had time to think about it, I don't know if I could draw you an really accurate picture of them. It's more like I have a broken, tattered kaleidoscope image of flashes of noise and too-vivid colour, chaos and bloody carnage. I remember the smell of them though. Musky and feral and their eyes...I'll never forget the inhumanity of their slanted, feline eyes.

Dean calls them 'were-kitties' or when we have to change the dressing on his leg, 'fucking Grumpy-Cats'. Sam usually rolls his eyes then and points out that they are 'ailuranthropes, Dean!'.

Whatever.

It doesn't matter that much to me because whatever they are, they killed just about everyone that is...was..._holy fuck how will I ever learn to say 'was' when I think about Tom, or Jack or Katie?..._important to me and so I just know that I hate them.

It doesn't give me any comfort either to know that we were just collateral damage, just random kill for this pack of creatures. In fact somehow it makes it worse cause if we had just turned a different corner, hiked another path, my family might be alive and with me instead of laying, torn apart, in that pretty, sunlight-dappled glade.

wWw

Sam and Dean had been hunting them for three weeks by the time I, and my now dead family, stumbled clumsily into their path,

I can't help but wish they had been an hour closer on the tail of the creatures. If that had been the case I think, maybe, more of us might have lived, but I don't blame them. How could I? They gave me my life, for what it's worth now.

When the creatures found us, with their sharp, ripping, tearing teeth and inch long claws that rent our flesh, I somehow made it to the edge of the clearing and up the rock wall to a narrow shelf some feet up the cliff. It was overhung at one end and so I crawled into the tight space and kicked and clawed and screamed back at them as they pounced to tried and drag me out.

That's where Dean and Sam found me. I don't know how long I'd been there? I think darkness had come and gone maybe a few times but it was hard to think clearly because all I could see was blood. Bright, wet blood, and pain and vicious, brutal, death.

When they got me down from the ledge, Sam tactfully avoided taking me back through the kill site but settled me at the foot of the cliff face and built me a little fire. I sat there watching the flames as they burnt pyres for the bodies of the cats they had managed to take down.

There were three, two males and a female I heard Dean say and I couldn't help but think, just like my family.

My dead family.

Tom, my husband. Jack, our handsome boy and Katie, my baby girl.

Sam and Dean burned their bodies too. Something about possible taint from the ailuranthropes making it necessary? How on God's earth would I ever explain that?

We slept that night there. Round the fire they had built for me and even though they were there, I started at every shadow, seeing slanted, amber eyes on each flare of the crackling flames.

Maybe Sam and Dean did too.

They didn't say if they did.

wWw

She came in the almost-light of day, on paws of soft, quiet velvet. She was damaged, Sam and Dean had seen to that and of course, it made her all the more dangerous.

Dean saw her before either Sam or I did. He was mid-sentence, explaining something about how we would make it down the mountain when he just stopped and looked into the trees.

She moved at a pace that was staggering considering the damage they had done her but I guess her rage fueled her. These hunters were the one's who had killed her mate and her offspring after all.

Part of me understood her.

Dean was on his feet before she reached us and he was a hand-span away from snatching up his blade when I got in his way.

I didn't mean to but seeing her sleek, black, blood-stained form hurtling toward me again lost me to reasoned thought and I just tried to bolt. I knocked the machete from his grip and she was on him before Sam could get to his side.

It was a short fight.

She was weakened and Sam was very nearly as swift to his feet as his brother was. Yet, the damage was done. The were-cat's claws ripped three parallel crimson stripes down Dean's thigh before Sam finished her with the knife and it took them nearly as long to stop my screams as it did to staunch the flow of Dean's blood.

wWw

We didn't know if there were any more? Whether as we fled the mountain others of their kind would come for us?

None did.

But it doesn't mean they never will.

And I know that now.

As do you.

Story ends

Thank you for reading. I hope you liked it.


End file.
